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These are tactical determinants to be sure, not sea-change level paradigm shifts in and of themselves.

By now, most people are aware of Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MOD) laying the blame squarely on Israel, when a more diplomatic response might have diluted the culpability to include Syrian incompetence and S-200 operator error. This conclusion is clearly at odds, and not just tonally, with Putin’s rather laconic and diffused assessment: “a chain of tragic, random events”.

There are even more nefarious theories such as one posed here on these very pages that the French frigate Auvergne or even RAF aircraft from the Akrotiri base in Cyprus were responsible for the Tl-20 strike, and that Russia chose to implicate the Israelis instead, one reason being, of course, to avoid inviting a NATO Article 5 response.

Of greater import (than freshly deployed MOD weapon inventories) is the bifurcation evidenced in the Russian response. There’s been a migration from the univocal and measured parsings of Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov and Press Secretary Peskov to a shared podium populated by a less nuanced, more binary power center consisting of Minister of Defense Shoigu, Deputy Defense Minister Gerasimov, and the so-called Stavka; binary as in, shoot or don’t shoot. How simpler can a march to war get?

In marked contrast to the advisory role of the Security Council of Russia, for example, a Stavka would be operationally focused, tasked with expediting strategic resource allocations in the event of a rapidly evolving, large scale conflict.

In a May 4th Asia Times article, Pepe Escobar predicted such a shift just prior to Putin’s ministerial appointments:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to announce a new government. And a bombshell is in the making. The new cabinet is bound to be a Stavka: that is, a war cabinet.”

In fact the personnel changes were minimal in the new government. And yet Shoigu’s enhanced speaking role, post-Il20, supports the contention that Putin’s range of motion, his up-until-now broad latitude of response, has been curtailed.

Without needing to pass judgment on the long-term efficacy of his absorb-then-counter-strike approach (or whether Russia has simply moved to a good cop/bad cop contrivance), the military-industrial faction at Putin’s back will insist, going forward, on less chess and more hammer.

In short, the Statesman Approach has ceded turf, willingly or otherwise, to the War Cabinet. Many have noted an emergent war cabinet footing in the Trump Administration as well, particularly with the arrival of National Security Adviser John Bolton in April.

Evidence of a converging lethality?

Just as war is a secular trend’s final economic gesture after a series of progressively under-performing business cycles (each successive cycle hobbled by mounting, unassailable debt), the efficacy of statesmanship dissipates in like fashion. Diplomacy becomes an exercise in pushing on rhetorical strings.

Has Putin acceded to a consensual or an imposed power-sharing? We’ll probably never know. Has he been relegated to adjunct status on military affairs? Highly unlikely. Let’s be deferential to the Russian President and call it a more collective response to future incitements. Nonetheless there is an unmistakable whiff of failure. Recourse to war is the ultimate failure of statesmanship.

If the reader will permit a brief philosophical interlude, war’s arrival is as supernatural as it is inevitable. Despite our many retrospective dissections, it routinely exceeds our efforts to fully understand and thus avert; at best, we succeed only in postponing it.

Lincoln said it best in his 1865 Second Inaugural near the conclusion of the American Civil War:

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it…Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

Human agency flatters itself as being the Prime Mover. Not so. War, of some cryptic accord, governs its own arrival.

And the war came.

In the Syrian theater today, human co-agency finds itself at an all-too-human impasse. Yesterday, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted that the IDF will continue operations to prevent Iran from establishing a Syrian foothold. This was in response to Russian Defense Minister Shoigu’s declaration the day before that the S-300 air defense systems and automated air defense management systems were on their way to Syria. Where is the conceivable walk-back for either side? The fuse is lit at both ends.

We are at an immovable object – irresistible force moment where elaborate pretexts and false flags recede in importance. How will a sickening slide to war be averted now? One senses, in the impasse, war’s hell-bent determination to arrive.

Another pressing casus belli

Straddling the two primordial nemeses –Land Power and Sea Power– there exists a hybridized, destabilizing construct, the Pipeline; call it land as oceanic usurper.

The Nordstream 2 pipeline project is one leading economic indicator that could forever alter the geopolitics beneath its ‘feet’. And it appears, despite President Trump’s most valiant efforts, to be a ‘go’.

The Berlin-to-Moscow pivot, should it proceed from this key connectivity, will extend Eurasian consolidation immeasurably. Here’s Tom Luongo recently with what amounts to a Mackinderite/Great Game interpretation:

“U.S. and British foreign policy has been obsessed for more than a hundred years with stopping the natural alliance between Germany’s industrial base and Russia’s vast tracts of natural resources as well as Russia’s own science and engineering prowess.

These two countries cannot, in any version of a unipolar world dominated by The Davos Crowd, be allowed to form an economic no less political alliance because the level of coordination and economic prosperity works directly against their goals of lowering everyone’s expectations for what humans can accomplish.”

George Friedman (formerly of Stratfor, more recently of Geopolitical Futures) has for years offered much the same rationale for the great wars of the modern era, below:

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There is a Left Hand and Right Hand at play in the world, each belonging to the same anatomy despite great efforts to obscure their dark connectivity. Opinions vary on the neural center. Suffice to say both hands are, at the moment, enacting their shadow-play with eerie simultaneity –one globally, the other closer to home.

Speaking of closer to home (for me anyway), let us touch briefly upon the battle currently underway in the US. The American domestic climate has everything to do with what’s transpiring on WW3’s formative fronts.

The Trump Russian Collusion narrative is collapsing at calamitous speed, exposed for the whole-cloth fiction it is.

The fact is the Syrian and NATO war theaters are being brought to a boil at precisely the same time the US flank of the Deep State (really the overarching Five Eyes transnational consortium of surveillance agencies that actively operate as One while maintaining the mirage of discrete and ‘cooperating’ national entities) is under unprecedented attack and potential exposure.

MI6 and GCHQ are all over the backstage shadow-play. Too many of the Collusion key players possess Five Eyes credentials: Stefan Halper (CIA, MI6), Joe Mifsud (MI6), Christopher Steele (MI6), Alexander Downer (ASIS, MI6), Robert Hannigan (GCHQ). That ‘former’ MI6 spy Chris Steele is consistently portrayed as a rogue retiree with a personal grudge against the President is a telling bit of institutional misdirection.

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Herein may lie the rationale behind Trump’s uncharacteristic reversal, specifically his September 21st retraction of a September 17th declassification order demanding vast troves of FBI un-redactions. How so? Because the request drew much bigger fish than the usual and expected slate of domestic adversaries known as the American ‘Deep State’.

Among other things, the redactions almost certainly conceal extensive Five Eyes participation. Trump will seek his pound of flesh wherever the plot-line takes him. And it seems to be leading to the international stage, from the ranks of America’s ‘steadfast allies’ no less.

I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release. Therefore, the Inspector General…..

Australia and the UK leaders are likely to have collapsed in a heap at the prospect of the Trump un-redactions. Suddenly Trump has been presented with a transnational cache of fresh leverage. The declassification hook drew a couple of foreign whales. So it’s been retracted pending a more ambitious fishing expedition.

Ponder too (particularly after listening to Napolitano, above) the earth-shaking ramifications of the following headlines:

“UK and Australian Governments Revealed as Central Players in Attempted Coup of US President”

OR

“Seeking to Avoid an NSA Imprimatur, President Obama Directly Sought GCHQ Intervention in an Effort to Subvert His Elected Successor, Trump”

What are the NATO implications alone?

And what countermeasures will pour forth to avoid/displace such a headline? America’s Dept of Justice/FBI participants in this attempted coup are suddenly reduced to mere parochial players in a burgeoning geopolitical tsunami of unprecedented magnitude. Faced with such abject exposure (not to mention cries of treason) Five Eyes has little choice but to unleash a diversionary countermeasure of similar scale.

That would be WW3.

Conclusion? The Russian ‘shift’ is commensurate with the heightened need in the West for a diversionary conflagration. Born in the aftermath of WW2, Five Eyes requires the ‘rejuvenative effects’ (heaven help us) of WW3. No matter that, in FVEY’S relentless pursuit of open-air lockdown, we might all die.

Call it panopticonic nihilism or Kafka’s cage in search of a post-nuclear bird.

The planet’s inexorable slide to war is the elephant in the CNN soundstage. With luck, we’ve seen the last of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s endless parade of fact-devoid assault victims, allowing us, here in the US anyway, to focus anew on that most pressing of national pastimes: Trump-bashing on the edge of the abyss.

Almost from the very start of his presidency, Vladimir Putin has been relentlessly vilified in the western media. If their portrayal of Mr. Putin reflected the objective truth, we should believe that the man has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. As I noted in the first in this series of excerpts from Grand Deception, systematic demonization of a nation’s leader predisposes many people to consent to war or regime change as means to help a stricken nation rid itself of a rotten, tyrannical leader. If we detest Vladimir Putin, we might approve of our intelligence communities orchestrating a coup to throw him out of power, even if the blood of some Russians is spilled in the process. It should be an honorable deed done for a greater good. Indeed, those who are desperate to have a regime change in Russia should be very keen for us to detest Mr. Putin. Hence the nonstop, un-nuanced negative coverage. Here I offer a different perspective: what if Putin isn’t an arch-villain? What if he does in fact have redeeming qualities? Should we not try to get to know the man a bit better before we shrug off another regime change or war to rid the world of tyrants?

According to his chief of security, Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin worked about two hours per day. The rest he spent eating, drinking, playing tennis, hunting or enjoying some other pastime. Vladimir Putin reportedly works exceptionally long hours and several of his advisers and ministers have testified to working with him until very late into the night and then receiving a call from him early in the morning the next day. Exiled banker and former oligarch Sergei Pugachev described his experience:

“…we hardly parted company, we met on a daily basis – from early morning to late evening until 3, until 4 AM, every day, every day. We naturally discussed matters of state business development, the state of the economy and so on. Putin needed someone who understood and knew those matters well.” (Harding, Smith and Maynard 2015)

Some of his advisors and ministers reported meeting with him to discuss some matter within their own domain of specialty only to be startled in realizing that Putin commanded a more detailed understanding of that very matter than they themselves had. Being that immersed in and devoted to his occupation enables Vladimir Putin to hold his famous marathon press conferences when he speaks for three or four hours answering journalists’ questions with accurate and detailed information and without teleprompters. His 14th annual call-in marathon in 2016 lasted 3 and a half hours during which he took and answered 80 questions! Most western politicians no longer dare to face any public forums without pre-packaged and rehearsed speeches, which they read off teleprompters, taking only a handful of questions from friendly reporters before their handlers usher them away from any potential embarrassment.

Fight against terrorism

Russia and the United States have had one major thing in common in the 21st century: their respective wars against terrorism. As the United States took its war on terror to Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia had been fighting her own war on terror in Chechnya which went on for nearly ten years, from August 1999 to April 2009. In the Summer of 2015, only six years after the hostilities had ceased Time magazine’s correspondent Simon Shuster visited Chechnya. He reported that:

“Chechnya has undergone a striking transformation. Its cities have been rebuilt with money from Moscow. All traces of its separatist rebellion have been suppressed.” (Shuster and Martinelli 2015)

“The kids growing up in Chechnya these days are a lot luckier than their parents and grandparents. At least the youngest ones have only known their homeland to be a peaceful and even quite beautiful place, full of enormous mosques and skyscrapers and shopping districts and fast food joints.”

By contrast, the American war on terror has left chaos and disorder in all nations it has touched, from Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. Kosovo, which has been a de-facto American protectorate since the year 2000, is today the poorest and most corrupt nation in Europe with massive population exodus and unemployment in excess of 35%. The ever sanctimonious West has frequently accused Vladimir Putin of heavy-handedness in his fight against Chechen terrorists (whom they usually call “rebels” or “separatists”), but this is an arbitrary and meaningless reproach. Western analysts may know what distinguishes a gentle war on terror from the ruthless kind, but this is a pointless debate that I would propose to settle by “judging them by their fruits.”

Forgiving Cuba’s debts

When Vladimir Putin visited Cuba in 2014, he wrote off 90 percent of the Cuba’s $32 billion debt owed to Russia from Soviet times. Conceivably, this may have been a calculated gesture made with some ulterior motive favorable to Russia’s interests. Even so, the gesture was remarkable because at that time, Western creditors led by the IMF had been pushing a cruel and inhumane austerity program on Greece for full repayment of her own debts. The same IMF that had raided Russia twenty years prior was now forcing an economic strangulation on Greece with similar effects on that country as it had on Russia in the 1990s.

The deranged mindset of Greece’s creditors was on display during the Brussels Group meeting in March of 2015. As Greece was coming dangerously close to defaulting on her debt obligations, the delegation representing her creditors suggested to Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis that his government would be able to service its debts by withholding payment of public employee salaries and pensions for two months. Recommending outright theft of money from ordinary Greeks did not seem to faze or embarrass Greece’s enterprising creditors.

One and a half years later, in November of 2016, the “leader of the free world,” US President Barack Obama, came to Greece on his last official visit. On that occasion, he offered neither help nor debt relief. Instead, he rubbed more salt into the country’s wounds by reiterating that Greece had to continue to press on with austerity, which had already pushed its economy into a crushing depression.

Regardless of motives and national interests, Vladimir Putin’s gesture in Cuba stood in sharp contrast to that of Greece’s creditors and U.S. President Obama. In essence, Vladimir Putin’s gesture toward Cuba was generous and humane. At the same time, West’s treatment of Greece has been inhumane and cruel.

Edward Snowden asylum

In June of 2013, U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden unveiled the massive extent of the NSA’s global surveillance program that illegally collected nearly all electronic and telephone communications of ordinary, law-abiding Americans and foreign nationals. Exposing the secrets of the American (and British) surveillance state turned Edward Snowden into a wanted man overnight and the CIA mounted one of their most massive manhunts ever. To evade capture, on Sunday, 23rd Jun 2013, Snowden boarded an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong to Moscow. His plan was to fly on to Cuba and from there to another South American country, possibly Venezuela or Ecuador. The U.S. government charged him with espionage and began immediately to pressure various governments around the world to apprehend Snowden and extradite him. By the time his flight from Hong Kong landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, American authorities revoked his passport and he was unable to continue his trip from Moscow, at which point his whereabouts became unclear.

Two days later, on 25th June, Vladimir Putin confirmed that Snowden was still at Sheremetyevo, that he was a free man, that he may choose his own final destination and that Russia would not arrest or extradite him. Through various channels, the U.S. government spent the following days trying to persuade their Russian counter parts to seize Snowden and turn him over. So keen were the Americans on getting Snowden that when they thought that he might attempt to flee Russia on the presidential jet belonging to the Bolivian President Evo Morales, they ordered the French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese authorities to breach international law and deny Bolivian President’s flight access to their airspace, forcing his aircraft to land in Vienna where President Morales and his crew were detained for 14 hours.

The CIA’s information that Snowden was on the plane turned out to be false so the whole diplomatic incident only succeeded in unmasking the nature of the relationship between the empire and its European vassals as well as their cavalier attitude toward international law. Apparently laws are there to be broken when the hegemon’s expediency obliges. The incident also showed Edward Snowden that it would have been futile for him to seek asylum with any Western nation allied with the U.S. since they would have been likely to violate their own laws to comply with an American extradition request. As a result, Snowden had little choice but to stay put and request asylum in Russia. On July 1st, Putin stated that Edward Snowden might be granted asylum in Russia on condition that he desists in causing further damage to “our American partners.”

Watching these events unfold through late June and July of 2013, I wondered if the Russians wouldn’t in the end get Edward Snowden and trade him for some big concession from their “American partners,” who were clearly extremely keen on getting the renegade whistle-blower. I remember thinking that the outcome of that incident would give us an important indication of what Vladimir Putin was made of: would he do the right thing and offer Snowden asylum and protection, or would he end up trading him off? My gut feeling was that Putin would indeed do the right thing, but at the same time I cringed at the thought that I might end up disappointed. After several weeks of legal procedures, on July 31st 2013, Snowden was granted asylum in Russia.

Today (it’s late March 2017), Edward Snowden has been living as a free man in Russia for nearly four years, thanks largely to Vladimir Putin’s principled stand and courage in defying American pressure. If not for his asylum in Russia, Snowden would today most likely be serving a very long prison sentence for doing his patriotic duty.